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Hey, everybody.
Happy Saturday morning or whenever this finds you.
Chuck here introducing this week's Selects episode.
And we're going to replay the great finger in the Wendy's chili caper episode from January 10th 2019.
There was a finger found in Wendy's chili, and this is that story.
Enough said.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry.
And this is the Stuff You Should Know Chili Caper Edition.
Corporate investigations, Las Vegas, San Jose.
Chili.
Yeah, and that means we get to use our special investigator nicknames.
Seattle Clark, Portland Bryant, and San Francisco Jerry Rowland.
That's not bad.
I would have chosen Tawny Katayan for me.
Yeah, that was a very ham-fisted way to set up. an in-show mention of our three shows next week.
Oh, oh, yeah.
That was actually lost on me, Chuck.
Next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
It's apparently lost on the Pacific Northwest because no one's coming.
Right.
Next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we will be in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.
Yeah.
On January 15th, 16th and 17th at the Moore Theater, Revolution Hall and the Castro for Sketch Fest.
And you have a end of the world live Friday night in San Francisco.
Mm hmm.
And I have a Movie Crush Live on Saturday afternoon in San Francisco.
I also have a Brooklyn End of the World 1-2 on the 24th, just FYI.
Hey, let's not get carried away here.
Okay, all right.
But those are the shows we have coming up, everyone.
So come on out.
There's still great tickets left at all three of these venues and all five probably.
I'm not sold out for Movie Crush.
No, I'm not either.
And especially those end-of-the-world and movie crush shows, are your best chance to hang out and talk to us personally, because they're more intimate venues.
Like I wear a negligee.
Well, Busy Phillips is there, so I'm going to have on my dinner jacket.
Oh, very nice.
Trying to impress her with my tuxedo look, which is not impressive.
Tuxedo and jeans.
It's a look.
So get all the information at sysklive.com.
Or for the Sketch Fest shows.
Just go to the SFSketchFest site and come out and support us everyone and shake our hand, pat us on the back or spit on our shoes.
Don't do that.
Don't do that.
Spit between our shoes.
Just make it close, you know.
Yeah, if you really hate us, spit between our shoes.
There you go.
That's going to end up on a T-shirt, I have a feeling.
All right, let's talk about chili fingers.
All right, so back in 2005.
Actually, let's get in the Wayback Machine and go watch this thing go down.
Wayback Machine, just for...
This short distance?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not like we can walk to 2005.
This is actually kind of great, though, because when you're 48 almost, to go back 13 years.
I want to go back up and do it all over.
So all of a sudden I'm 35, which I thought was old.
Yeah.
But, man, I'd love to be 35 right now.
I'm pretty happy with 42, I've got to say.
I'm not quite...
All right, Chuck.
So like you said, Wendy's can't just be like, that lady's a liar.
There's no way that's our finger.
They had to basically operate in the background.
They couldn't appear like they were obstructing the police investigation.
They couldn't appear like they were smearing Anna Ayala, especially because the early reports were very sympathetic to this woman too.
Everybody was very grossed out by this.
But at the same time, they had to deal with this issue and they had to get to the bottom of whose finger this was and where the finger came from.
Yeah, and so the obvious first place to start is the restaurant itself.
The employees there, the very obvious first place to start is to see if anyone was missing a finger.
Sure, and that's what they did.
They said, show us your hands.
Yeah, everyone looked at everyone's fingers.
They were all there and they went all right.
So far, so good.
They would eventually put everyone on staff through a polygraph test, which they all passed.
They would obviously.
Then they would go to up the supply chain to see if this thing might have – because you know these things happen.
Yeah, rarely they do, though.
Well, I found five other cases of fingers in fast food.
That were legitimate?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, wow.
So it happens.
Up the supply chain.
You know there can be an industrial accident that leaves a finger in a bag of lettuce greens or something.
And that might eventually find its way to a Wendy's Super Bar.
Oh, my God.
You know?
It doesn't happen much.
I wouldn't be too freaked out.
I'm still freaked out.
We'll go over those at the end.
Okay.
But they're going up the supply chain.
They're really doing their due diligence.
They can't find – they offer a reward at first of 50 grand, later 100 grand.
Well, they set up, yeah, a hotline for tips.
But they're basically, as time is going on, becoming more and more confident about They.
Did not have a finger in that.
Chili by their own fault.
They traced the chili ingredients to seven different suppliers and they got documentation from all seven suppliers that nobody at their companies had suffered any kind of finger injury at any recent time.
And also, like you said, no one at the store, no one at any of the nearby stores, had suffered any finger injury, let alone an amputation.
And so Wendy's was like, this didn't come from us.
This didn't come from inside our store.
And they also kind of ran a simultaneous forensic investigation as well.
They hired a woman named Dr Lynn Bates, who's the CEO of a company called Alteca out of Manhattan, Kansas.
And if you are looking for evidence or study of a body part that was found in food, you go to Dr Lynn S Bates in Altecca, because they engage in forensic food microscopy.
That's what they do.
That's their bread and butter is studying body parts found in food.
And she'd been doing it since 1986.
So Wendy's went to her and said, here is a piece of this finger.
Was this finger cooked in this chili? whose finger is it?
She's like I can't tell you whose finger it is, but I can tell you that there is no indication that this finger was cooked for three hours in chili at 170 degrees.
It just wasn't.
So that was a that combined with the, the Wendy's no, Wendy's employer or suppliers, employers missing a finger that told Wendy's everything they need to know that they were being defrauded.
Yeah, and you would think just grab a fingerprint police force.
They weren't able to.
They said if they found a hand that they could literally look and compare fingerprints, but they didn't get a good enough print off it to do a legitimate database search.
Right, right.
They just had to sit around and wait for that hand to show up.
Because that thing had been cooking in chili for three hours.
It had not been cooked in chili for three hours.
That's right.
At any rate...
So Wendy's knew what was going on.
Now they had to go to the cops and say, we're being defrauded.
Not only did they have the search for the missing finger investigation internally, and they hired Lynn Bates to do forensic work on the finger itself.
They also hired a detective to... to start looking around at Anna Ayala.
And the detective turned up some very interesting stuff about her.
Yeah, he was like, wait a minute.
This woman has filed at least 13 civil lawsuits, some against major corporations.
And they, he probably could have stopped there.
And Wendy's would have just been like Dave Thomas from the grave would have said see there she's no good.
That's a, that's a good Dave Thomas.
So I think he would have said like, she should still get the benefit of the doubt.
I don't know, man.
When you've, When someone is this – has a pattern of litigious behaviors like this.
Well, maybe he finished with prove me wrong.
One, there were a couple of notable ones. that it's sort of frustratingly hard to find information.
She claimed that she won a 30000 settlement from El Pollo Loco for medical bills from her daughter getting sick from salmonella.
El Pollo Loco has always been on record saying...
Never happened.
We did not give that lady a dime.
Right.
GM.
She sued GM because the front wheel of her car came off and there was an accident and that suit was dismissed with prejudice.
When she fired her lawyer was a no-show in court.
Oh, is that what that means?
No, no, no.
With prejudice means you can't bring it back.
Oh, okay.
So she can't say, well, I didn't show up and my lawyer was bad, so let's do this again.
Okay, I got you, I got you.
So basically it was dead in the water.
So she sued a former employer for sexual harassment.
I'm not even going to comment on that one because I have no idea.
That could very well have been legitimate.
That one struck me as possibly legitimate, but she dropped it.
Right.
She lawyered up immediately with the chili finger and everything made Chief Rob Davis very suspicious.
And then this guy that lived with her family named Ken Bono or Bono.
What would you say, Bono?
I've been saying Bono.
It hasn't even occurred to me it could be Bono.
Ken Bono?
Maybe it's related to Bono.
Ken Bono, because the cops are starting to ask questions at this point.
They do official investigations.
They search her house.
She claims that they held a gun to her head, ransacked her home and abused her daughter, which is quite a charge for a finger.
Chili house investigation.
There's a picture of her and her daughter in the driveway talking to a reporter and her daughter's got like her arm in a sling, but like the kind of sling you just go by at the Always making up stories in suing companies.
She's always looking for that get-rich angle.
Her husband owes a ton of money.
400K.
And so this is all sorting.
They're starting to finger her, if you will, for this crime.
Mm-hmm.
That's the worst pun ever.
I thought we were going to make it through this, but no.
I've even been saying tip line about the finger and just ignoring it.
I know you did.
But okay, all right, it's done.
It's out there.
So they finally, like you said, even though she was like, oh, let's just forget about it.
They're like, no, no, no, we can't do that.
And then there enters a lady.
And it didn't end up having the hugest impact on the case itself, but it is worth mentioning this woman named Sandy Allman.
This is a little strange.
So this is a woman who owned exotic cats.
Big cats.
Leopards, jaguars.
Tigers, I think.
Is that how we're saying Jaguars now?
Jaguar?
Yeah.
Wow.
That's how the Brit says it on the commercial.
Is it a year-end sales event up in here?
Yeah, the Jaguar X12.
So this lady owns these big cats.
This is not too far from Vegas where she lives in Pahrump, Nevada, I guess.
Or is it on the California side?
Do you know?
I think it's Nevada.
Okay.
I don't know, actually, now that you mention it.
And she eventually, I guess, has to get rid of these cats and calls in a rescue group that does things like this.
They're like we're a wild animal orphanage and you're a dum-dum who bought all these animals you shouldn't have had.
So now we will deal with it.
And during this transfer of animals, she's attacked by a spotted leopard.
And it bites off her finger.
Yes.
And she says, she comes forward and says, I think that is my finger.
No, no.
I think actually a person who is at the wildlife rescue at the time was the one who called the tip line with that one.
Oh, I thought because she wanted to take a DNA test and everything.
Oh, I didn't see that.
Okay.
All right.
Cool.
So she's the one who called and said, that's my finger?
Well, she wanted.
I don't know if she literally picked up the phone and called, but she got involved such that she wanted to take a DNA test to find out if that was her finger.
Gotcha.
Okay, cool, cool.
Well yeah, because she had said that the last time she'd seen it it was on ice in the emergency room.
So I guess she wasn't the sentimental type who's like, I want my finger back.
Would you?
Oh, yeah.
Float it in some formaldehyde?
Yumi would probably have that thing gilded and wear it around her neck.
Oh.
Yeah.
I'd be like, that's my finger on Yubi's neck.
Check it out.
But so the whole thing was just a red herring, though, a blind alley, right?
Like it went nowhere.
No, it was not her finger.
No.
There were some other tips that came in about the finger.
The Mexican authorities I guess just over the border got involved because it was rumored that an incident with a ranch hand losing a finger in Mexico had been the source of the finger.
Even as Ana Ayala who, by the way, that whole tip about the trailer sale, the trailer scam that came in from Wendy's hotline as well.
Oh, really?
Mm-hmm.
By this time, I believe it was day 22?
Yeah.
No, I'm sorry.
It was day 30, 32, I believe.
About a month after the incident originally happened, Ana Ayala and Jamie Palencia, her husband, were both arrested in Las Vegas him for the child support payments, failure to pay child support, her for that trailer scam.
And so while they're on ice in Las Vegas, Wendy's is still conducting this investigation.
San Jose are still conducting this investigation.
And they've got them.
They have them on this other stuff.
But I guess they just kind of kept him from running.
And that's why they arrested him, knowing that they were eventually going to build the case.
I'm not sure.
But that's exactly what happened, because I think.
About 52 days after she walked into that Wendy's and put the finger in the chili and took that bite, they charged them for grand theft, for basically defrauding Wendy's.
Yeah, and at this point, as far as the police were concerned, they were like we don't even need to know whose finger this is at this point.
Right.
Like, that's really immaterial.
But Wendy's... they still have a public relations crisis going on.
And they're like, we really would like to find out where this finger came from.
Just so, like, as many facts out there as possible will really help us restore our good name.
Right.
If we can actually pinpoint whose finger this is and exactly how this happened and let everybody know what went on.
Yeah, so they actually, that's when they up the reward from $50,000 to $100,000, right?
That's right.
And that's when they hit the jackpot, which is ironically, they got two callers On the 100000 line.
Go ahead, caller.
You're on the $100,000 chili finger line.
And then for the next 30 seconds, like, hello, am I on?
Can you hear me?
Yes, you're on.
You're on.
Go ahead, caller.
Go ahead, caller.
Am I live right now?
So two people called.
One to this day, as far as I can tell, has remained anonymous.
The other one was a guy named Mike Casey.
